


A Light in the Darkest Night

by wordsmithraven



Series: The Light of a Star over the Sea [2]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Bullying, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mild Language, Minor Violence, Past Relationship(s), Rare Pairings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-22 20:18:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11387643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordsmithraven/pseuds/wordsmithraven
Summary: Maryse nervously prepares for her first date with Lucian after her messy separation from Robert. While getting dressed, she remembers back to when she first met him all those years ago when she was young and vulnerable during the worst time of her life.





	A Light in the Darkest Night

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm getting a bunch of bugs to write these rare pairs the show is giving me. lmao After that little one shot that was more malec than anything else, I decided to keep going on the Luke/Maryse train. It's also a little bit of a Maryse character study. Let me know what you think of how I wrote her.
> 
> I'm also thinking of doing a part two that shows the actual date. 
> 
> Have at it and leave some comments. Thanks! :)

 

Maryse sat in front of her vanity mirror, brushing her curling hair with a soft bristled antique brush. She was wearing an emerald green cocktail dress, low cut with thin straps. In front of her were two diamond earrings with gold settings resting on a bed of velvet. They were a match for the diamond drop necklace already secured on her neck.

Her makeup was already applied, reddish coral lipstick and subtly gold eyeshadow. Her hands shook a little as she worked on her hair. She had debated for nearly an hour but had finally settled on leaving it loose and falling to her shoulders per Isabelle’s suggestions before she’d been deployed for a mission. She’d said Maryse’s usual styles were a bit too intense for a date.

Maryse Lightwood née Trueblood was going on a date.

It was her first one in so many years she barely even remembered. She and Robert had stopped going on dates shortly after they had taken over the New York Institute. They’d both been so focused on trying to restore the Lightwood name after their disgrace, trivial things like dating had fallen by the wayside.

They hadn’t done much of that beforehand anyway, what with their Circle activities and general shadowhunter duties getting in the way. Those kinds of carefree things had been so scarce that Maryse had hardly even noticed when they’d stopped completely.

Now, in her mid-forties and after giving birth to three children, Maryse had to think about dating. She’d never been the sentimental sort so it was fairly unfamiliar territory for her. It was…more nerve wracking than she had expected.

For Lucian, however, dating was necessary for a relationship. He was a deeply romantic and extremely blunt sort, and when he had felt the mood changing between them, he’d come right out and asked her to dinner in the city. He had been gentle but very adamant that whatever was happening between them would go no further until they “did things properly.”

Nothing had actually happened between them yet. No kisses or other intimacy, no verbal declarations of feelings, just the occasional loose handhold. During her time trying to right her various wrongs with the people she had hurt, she had been talking with Lucian more and more, and a strange pull towards him had begun to grow within her.

It was an unexpected and silly thing. A late stage crush she had attributed to being lonely and being jealous that Robert was out there happy with Annamarie. Lucian was inordinately handsome and an old friend with whom she was reconnecting. It was inevitable that Maryse would get confused over her feelings.

She had mostly resigned herself to hiding it until the childish feelings fizzled out. After all, she had told herself, Lucian would never return them. Maryse had witnessed Lucian’s immense love for Jocelyn from when they were teenagers, and though she had been away from them for nearly twenty years after the Circle, she had known that the love had only grown stronger in the brief moments Maryse had seen them after Clarissa Fairchild’s sudden arrival in her children’s lives. Even more, while it had been over a year since Jocelyn’s untimely death, Maryse could see that Lucian was still deeply affected by it.

So it came as quite a shock the week before when Lucian had proposed a date. It had happened after one of Alec’s cabinet meetings, when Lucian had been there to discuss his recent pack growth. He and Maryse had been talking afterward as they had started to do regularly and Maryse had reached out to squeeze Lucian’s hand in hers while laughing. It had taken them both several minutes to realize that they’d never let go.

Lucian had looked for a long time at their joined hands as an awkward silence stretched between them. When she’d tried to pull away, his fingers had gripped hers tight.

“Come to dinner with me, Maryse,” he’d said in his low baritone.

“What?” she had asked breathlessly.

“Next week. I want to take you to a restaurant.” His voice was steady and firm. “This goes no further until then.”

She had stood shocked silent for nearly five minutes before she’d mutely nodded. He had dropped her hand after one more squeeze, turned on his heel and left with no more said between them.

Maryse really wasn’t the dating sort but she knew her heart was already gone for him. She would adapt. For Lucian.

Maryse looked into the large ornate mirror set up in her room, checking the fall of her hair one last time. Her brown eyes were a little wide with anxiety and she took a dep breath to calm her racing heart.

She wasn’t sure why she was so afraid. Lucian had always been a gentleman, though a little too blunt and forthright for her tastes. When she’d been younger, she’d found him grating at times but eventually she’d started to consider that part of his personality charming in its own way. Regardless he’d been infinitely kind to her from the very first time she had ever spoken with him. More kind than she’d ever been to him then and since. There was nothing to fear from him.

Maryse smiled a little when she thought back to the day she’d officially met him. It was a pained and sad smile. The memory wasn’t even close to a happy one. It had been during one of the darkest times of Maryse’s life, after all.

Still, Lucian had been an unexpectedly bright light in the midst of it.

***

The day Maryse had met Lucian Graymark had been during the worst month of her teenage life—properly met him, not just seen him around the Academy. She’d known who he was, of course. How could she not? Valentine and Lucian had been two of the most popular warriors in their cohort.

They had been valiant, strong, charismatic, and full of vitality. Lucian had had a slow start for some reason Maryse had never found out but once Valentine had started tutoring him, the pair had shown more brightly than any other fighters there. Twin stars in a perfect constellation.

Valentine had been the dazzling sort, for sure—and she had been caught by his charisma herself later on when he started his Circle—but his light had been harsh and blinding, hard like a diamond cut with an edge.

Lucian had been a slow and steady glow, like a sun set just far enough away not to overwhelm yet close enough to warm. When he turned his attention to you, you swelled with life.

Being the reclusive and serious sort, Lucian spent most of his time bestowing that light upon exactly two people: Valentine, who everyone knew was going to be his _parabatai_ , and Jocelyn Fairchild. Lucian and Jocelyn had been best friends growing up. Maryse hadn’t been up on the details at the time but anyone who had even a modicum of observational skills could see how devoted Lucian was to the redhead. In fact, if Maryse hadn’t known Valentine and Jocelyn were going steady, she might have thought Lucian was looking to date her.

Maryse hadn’t really interacted much with any of them up until that terrible day. Lucian and Jocelyn were two years younger than her so they didn’t really have any classes together. As for Valentine, well, he just had never paid her any attention in their classes together. It hadn’t bothered her much. She’d had her own friends, after all.

Maryse was seventeen when all that changed. Her whole life changed, really. It was the day she had learned her brother would be struck from the Trueblood line, exiled because he wanted to be with a mundane.

Maryse’s mother had been the one to tell her. Maryse remembered the Dean knocking on the door to her Ancient Runic Strategy class with her mother next to him looking more foreboding and rigid than Maryse had ever seen her. It was rare for that type of thing to happen, so the entire class had taken notice.

Maryse remembered her hands shaking, thinking that someone had died. Max had fire messaged her a week before that he was going on a pretty dangerous mission soon and she had not heard back from him. Her mother’s sharp, disapproving gaze had made her get control of herself and Maryse had risen to follow her and the Dean into the hall.

“Maryse,” her mother had said as she stood from her desk. “Bring your things. You won’t be coming back for a few days.”

Her mother’s voice had been tight with anger. Maryse had known that voice very well. It had strafed her for years before her growth spurt. Back when Maryse’s tiny frame had been insufficient for weapons use and everything she did had been a disappointment in her mother’s eye.

Her ears had rung with a high pitched whine as she had packed her books and study implements quietly and efficiently. She’d known something had gone horribly wrong but she had been almost too afraid to find out.

That weekend Maryse had attended her first ever de-Runing ceremony. Family members were required to be present at de-Runing ceremonies so they’d serve as examples to those still in the family. Other shadowhunters had the option to watch as well, if they wanted to. During high profile cases, usually involving full treason, the Clave liked to make a whole spectacle of them.

She’d known what it was, of course, but they were so rare Maryse had never had opportunity to see one. It was unfortunate that her first one had been her beloved brother’s.

Maryse remembered it so vividly, even over twenty-five years later. It had been early afternoon on a Saturday in November. It had been cold and wet, the weather just on the edge of turning to snow. She had been sitting in the pews of the outdoor Roman-style amphitheater just outside of Alicante. The rough stone had bit into her legs and the smell of burnt flesh had clogged her every breath.

Maxwell had been strapped to a rack right in front of her and her parents. He'd been stripped down to nothing but his underwear. Every time the Silent Brothers pressed a red-hot adamas brand to a rune, Max would screech and Maryse would dig her fingers harder into the sandstone beneath her. By the end, her fingers were scratched raw and bloody, though they were not nearly as badly mangled as Max’s mutilated body.

It took her years before Max’s screams left her dreams. Even then, they came back occasionally when she thought of him or when she was having a particularly rough time in her life.

When they had finally finished with him, they’d dragged him away before Maryse could talk to him. Not that she would have been allowed to, anyway. Once the last rune was gone and they’d force fed him the potion to completely strip the rest of his angelic gifts from him, Max was meant to be officially dead to her. She’d not been allowed to speak to him beforehand and after that no one would be allowed to speak to him ever again.

She remembered his eyes, though. Their usually vibrant hazel had been dimmed with agony and lined with red veins. He had kept his eyes on her the entire ceremony. Max was four years older than her but they had always been close. The only two Trueblood children left—last of the name. The Truebloods had never been a large family so with Max gone from the registry, their name would die with her eventual marriage unless some mundane-turned-shadowhunter repurposed it in the future after Ascending with the Mortal Cup. Either way, her family's blood tie to the name was now broken.

Maryse wasn’t thinking about any of that at the de-Runing ceremony, of course. Those thoughts would come later. No, at the moment of the most traumatic experience of her life Maryse had been locked eye to eye with her brother, sobbing uncontrollably as the city guards yanked him away to the side of the stone arena, feet struggling to keep up. He had been straining to look back at her, yelling her name and how much he loved her.

She had been doing the same, tears blurring her sight and snot running down her face. Maryse remembered standing like she was going to run to him and her mother’s bruising grip on her arm holding her in place. The last thing Maryse saw of Max had been when the strength had left his legs and the guards had been forced to pull his limp body the rest of the way to where they would open the portal to abandon him in the mundane world.

Maryse had returned to the Academy that Monday after. Before she left Alicante to return to the Academy, her father had been sure to lecture her on what her duties were now that she was the only heir to the family. After that day, saving the family honor had fallen to Maryse. Her parents had already struggled to have the two children that they did and were now too old to have any more. It was a futile thing for her parents to have hoped for as the name was all but dead. Once Maryse married, she would be honor bound to focus on her husband’s family name, not her own anymore.

Maryse had understood the score even before her father had explained. She would be shipped out to any family she could nab in a desperate attempt to recover from their dishonor. The Truebloods weren’t a prominent family, by any means. They didn’t have as many noteworthy ancestors or as much wealth as the Herondales or the Penhallows and the like. Still, they had a pure line unbroken for over four centuries, a reasonable amount of inheritance, and had never had any major scandals to the family name…until Max, of course. If they could find a family that needed a young bride and wouldn’t look too closely at their recently tarnished reputation, some of their standing with the Clave could be restored.

Maryse had resigned herself to an arranged marriage, knowing that whatever tepid dreams she had of marrying for love were gone. She would do her duty, as her parents bid. She had never been overly romantic anyway so at the time she had not found the idea of it that great of a loss anyway.

That week after the ceremony had started horribly and never let up. Maryse had gone to her classes in a grief-stricken haze, completely unable to concentrate on anything around her. It was why it had taken her several days to notice that all of her friends were no longer her friends at all.

It took Maryse asking Daniella Adderley, her closest friend since joining the Academy, to borrow her Chthonian Dictionary for a paper and the other girl completely ignoring her for Maryse to finally notice.

Maryse had been completely taken aback by the rebuff. When she’d confronted Danny over it a few hours later during lunch, the girl had coldly explained that Maryse was to stop associating with her if she knew what was good for her. Then she’d dumped an entire ink bottle over Maryse’s books and flounced off surrounded by all of Maryse’s formers friends, none of whom tried to help her or said a word in defense. Not even her then boyfriend.

It had been one of the most humiliating experiences of Maryse’s life.

Most of the other students in her cohort had begun to not-so-subtly ostracize her from then on. Before long the outright bullying had started. Her bed linens would go missing, her food would suddenly be drowned with salt, or her weapon holsters would be cut through…petty, childish cruelties.

The shunning had hurt her, of course it had, and it had enraged her at times but most of the time Maryse had been so numb she didn’t think she could summon the energy to care at all. All of it was insignificant in the face of losing Max. That hurt more than any pain she’d ever endured.

When Maryse had met Lucian, it was almost three weeks after her brother’s exile. She had been out alone on a hillock a few hundred yards away from the towering school in the east.

She had just finished re-sharpening her broadsword. Some asshole had decided to dull the edge of her blade while she had slept. She’d almost died for it on the training mission they’d taken that morning into the Black Forest in Germany and her blade had merely bounced off the whipping tail of a scorpios demon they’d encountered. Luckily she’d decided to bring a secondary seraph dagger and she was able to gut the thing before it killed her. Her right arm was still numb from the demon’s barbed strike even despite the healers giving her the all clear for it.

So there Maryse had been on her own, away from the rest of the school body, sitting on a cold boulder with her whetstone, and blankly running it along the edge of her weapon.

She had been chilled to the bone, wearing little more than her training leathers, boots, and a cotton blouse. She’d thrown her coat and her dimensional scabbard behind her. There had been a heavy snowfall two days prior but Maryse hadn’t really cared about the cold. One more swipe of her whetstone and she’d dropped it next to the coat, standing and settling into her practice stance.

She had decided to practice her forms. She was still not where she wanted to be with it, what with having her growth spurt only a couple of years before and thus pushing back her proper training for it. She’d had less time to practice with the broadsword but her stubborn nature had dictated that that would be the one she would master. It was her mother’s weapon and Maryse would be damned if she let her mother find her lacking in it after all those years telling her to give it up.

She had launched into her furious practice session when he came up on her. She must’ve been going for hours as the sun was already setting when she heard the crunch of footsteps in snow behind her.

The sound startled her and her weak arm folded under the weight of her swing. Her leg had crumpled next then her broadsword had dropped to the side and sliced her thigh open in a long slash.

“Son of a bitch,” she’d yelled as she fell to the snow completely losing her grip on her hilt.

“By the Angel, Trueblood,” a deep voice still cracking with puberty had said. “Are you okay?”

“No, you asshole. I’m fucking bleeding all over the place!”

And she had been. Her blood had arched over the snow next to her, a spray of brilliant red against the white. Even in the darkening sky it stood out.

She was too busy clutching at her wound and writhing on the ground to pay attention to whoever it was that had interrupted her. It was a shock then when leather clad arms reached around her and scooped her up into muscled arms.

She yelped as her vision swam with the movement. She looked up to find Lucian Graymark holding her tight to his chest.

He was only just turned sixteen if she remembered his birthday correctly, but he was already a head taller than her and rapidly filling his gangling frame with a warrior’s muscles. The Graymarks had tended to produce giants, Maryse remembered. His sisters Amatis and Cleophas were towering too.

Lucian took four long strides over to the low boulder and set her down on it gently. He knelt down next to her, decisively pulled her hands away from her wound, and lifted her thigh up to get a better look. The motion overbalanced her so much she had to throw an arm back to catch herself.

Maryse was so startled and he was so confident that she just sort of let him do what he wanted for a moment. She snapped out of it when he gripped her leathers at the rip and pulled it more, tearing the slash wider and exposing a good portion of her thigh.

“Hey!” she shouted, a little affronted at his audacity.

He ignored her and reached into his coat, pulling out a witch light and his stele.

“Here,” he said, handing her the witch light.

She was still angry but the pain was getting worse and her arm was still throbbing. She wasn’t a fool. She could see he was trying to help her despite being the cause of her mishap. So she took the witch light grudgingly and concentrated on lighting it so he could see better.

The witch light blazed right in his face. He flinched a little and Maryse smirked in revenge. Lucian caught the look and pursed his lips at it but declined to comment. Instead, he went back to her thigh.

In the new light the gash looked immense. It curl from the front of her leg around and down to the side. It was oozing blood that dribbled over the boulder and down onto Lucian’s bent knee.

“The gash looks pretty shallow even though it’s long as hell. I think an iratze will be good enough. Do you have one already?” he asked, pulling his scarf from his neck and pressing it to her leg.

“It’s probably faded,” she replied, hissing at the press on her thigh. She pulled aside her collar to show where she usually placed the iratze rune at the base of her neck.

Lucian grunted, pulled back his scarf from the cut to avoid it healing over the threads, and ran his stele along her skin to redraw the rune. Maryse grimaced slightly at the burn.

She felt the flesh of her leg begin to knit together. It was a wholly unpleasant sensation and her thigh muscles tightened at the feel.

Lucian must’ve felt her muscles tense under his hand because he began to massage her thigh. “Relax. It might heal crooked and leave a scar.”

Maryse went slack jawed. She just could not believe he was really doing this. Just when she felt the wound close, she slapped his hands away and jumped up, prepared to chew him out for his forwardness.

She had underestimated her blood loss and her lingering fatigue, however. When she stood, she immediately went dizzy and swayed to the side.

“Whoa, there,” Lucian said, catching her and settling her back on the boulder. “Maybe take a moment before you jump all over me.”

He was smiling as he said it and Maryse felt her cheeks flood with heat, embarrassed and angry all in one. She had almost _fainted_ like some weak, damsel mess. Intolerable.

“I’m fine,” she bit out between her teeth.

Her swimming vision said otherwise but Lucian didn’t need to know that.

He was more observant than she had hoped, however, and he gripped her shoulder tight to keep her in place as he pulled aside her shirt collar again.

“You’ve lost blood and you’ve been training. Plus, I heard you got hurt this morning in your class, right? Your head is probably spinning like a carousel right about now.”

Maryse stayed stubbornly quiet and tried to focus on a single point to stop her swirling vision. Her eyes caught on a shine at his throat, previously covered by his scarf. It was a plain, silver arrowhead suspended on a chain. It didn’t look like a decorative necklace but rather like an actual arrowhead with nicked edges and a slightly bent tip. It shown brightly against his dark skin, made all the brighter by the witch light in her hand.

Lucian’s chosen weapon was a crossbow and she could see the handle of it peeking over his shoulder from where it was slung. He had a bundle of bolts in dimensional slots strapped to his thigh. Maryse supposed the arrow necklace was connected to his weapon somehow.

While she had been so focused on clearing her vertigo, Lucian began drawing another rune on her.

“I’ll give you an amissio too. That should help replenish you,” he said and pressed his stele to her chest just above her heart and below her deflect rune.

When he finished the rune, she felt her skin tingle and the slight headache she’d begun to develop started to fade. Blood was rushing past her ears and she felt a boost in energy.

She pressed her lips together and nodded sharply, indicating that the runes had worked.

Lucian immediately stepped back from her and put away his stele.

Maryse decided not to push her recovery this time and stayed seated, witch light gripped tight in her hand.

“Thank you,” she said stiffly.

Lucian dipped his head.

“Though, frankly, it’s your fault in the first place,” she continued, not one to bow gracefully.

Lucian let out an incredulous laugh. “Really? How do you figure?”

“If you hadn’t snuck up on me—”

“I will take some of the fault for that but I wouldn’t have startled you so badly if you’d been paying attention to your surroundings.”

She opened her mouth to argue but he kept going right over her.

“Or if you had noticed that you were pushing your body beyond its limits and not been practicing so hard all the way out here in the dead of winter. What were you doing out here instead of in the training yards, anyway?”

She snapped her mouth shut and looked away from him at that. She was out there because the training yards were becoming as treacherous as the battlefield for her. She wasn’t one to talk about her issues with some boy she didn’t even know, however, so he could go on wondering.

“Everybody giving you a hard time, then? Sorry, I forgot.”

Or he could guess _exactly_ what was wrong and openly talk about it to her face like a completely rude ass.

Maryse rose from her seat without acknowledging his words and shoved the witch light into his chest angrily. The light flickered off then brightened when Lucian began to light it himself.

She didn’t sway this time so she took it as a sign and kept going, bending to pick up her coat and dropping her whetstone into a pocket. She was still heated from the combination of her workout, her healing runes, and her temper so she left her coat off. She buckled her dimensional scabbard back onto her hip and took a few wobbly steps to her fallen sword.

She almost tipped herself bending over to pick it up. She felt a hand grip her arm to steady her as her hand grabbed at her sword’s hilt. She shut her eyes in frustration but allowed the help right up until she rose back up. Then she yanked her arm from his hand and shoved her broadsword into her scabbard. The blade disappeared at her hip, leaving only the hilt which she tilted to line up along her waist.

She whipped around to head back to the school proper but stumbled over some stupid rock beneath the snow.

Lucian caught her a third time and Maryse burst into tears.

She felt the younger man next to her tense but she was so lost in all the emotions that were flooding her head, she could barely pay attention to him.

Everything was overwhelming her: her still aching arm, her traitorous ex-friends, her parents’ never ending lectures, her subpar sword skills…even the garbage tuna sandwich she’d eaten at lunch that had been filled with paprika but which she had stubbornly choked down rather than take back to the lunch line in front of the entire mess hall.

The biggest wave came from thinking about Max, of course. Not just pain and loss and loneliness but an anger she hadn’t felt before then. He’d left her, after all. He’d had a choice to leave his girlfriend or leave the Shadow World and he’d chosen _her_. Left Maryse and their parents for some dumb mundane who didn’t even know their family or their world. Some mundane who had decided she didn’t want to Ascend and convinced her brother to leave with her. He’d abandoned his family for some tail…some weak, _nothing_ of a girl.

 _Love,_ she thought irately. _What a joke!_ Love had never done anything for Maryse. Even her shitty boyfriend, Adrian Summerfield, had dumped her the moment the Truebloods had been shamed from Max’s exile.

Before she knew it, her face was pressed into Lucian’s shoulder and her hands were clutching at his coat. She was sobbing openly and her whole body was shaking. It was the second most embarrassing thing to happen to her that night. The first being the tumble from her disastrous practice session.

Lucian was right, of course. She shouldn’t have been out practicing before her arm had fully healed and her peripheral acuity had been absolute shit because she’d been so focused on her recent instance of shunning.

If she didn’t get her act together, she’d never graduate in a year and likely tarnish the family name even more from her failure.

She was a damned mess.

Maryse wasn’t sure how long she stood there in Lucian’s arms crying but it was pitch black out and she was freezing by the time she lifted her head. Lucian hadn’t said a word the entire time she’d been crying. She was sort of thankful for that mercy, at least.

“Shit,” she said, wiping at her face. “Don’t tell anybody about this, Graymark.”

She avoided looking in his eyes but she saw him flash a smile. She bent to pick up her coat, fallen at some point during her deluge of emotions. She shrugged the garment on with a shiver.

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Trueblood,” he’d said with not even a hint of mockery in his tone.

She finally found the composure to look him in the eye again. His smooth, clean shaven face was as still as a lake, though a little smile still edged along his mouth. He looked younger than his height and strength suggested and his expression was open and earnest.

Maryse bit her lip and decided to trust his word.

With no more words exchanged, she turned around and slowly made her way back to the Academy, only occasionally needing Lucian’s hand to keep her from falling.

***

Maryse smiled as she thought back on her ill-fated meeting with Lucian, reaching forward to pick up her first earring. She had been a terrible harpy in her grief.

Lucian hadn’t been turned away by her contrariness, however. He could be plenty closed off too, after all. Maryse suddenly realized she’d never learned by he’d been out on the hill alone himself all those years ago. She’d been so focused on her own issues, she’d never remembered to ask.

Over the next few weeks after that day, Lucian had slowly drawn her into his small group of friends. Before long she had been thick as thieves with Jocelyn, Valentine, and the rest. And Lucian, of course.

That was when she had met Robert too. He was another one of Valentine’s groupies back then. Before a year had passed, she and Robert had begun dating and were deep in the Circle, committing acts she now looked back on with shame.

It had been easy to fall under Valentine’s sway then. She’d been so alone after her brother had left and her friends had abandoned her. Lucian and Jocelyn had been so kind, and Valentine…well, he’d seemed to make so much sense to a girl filled with rage and resentment towards a Clave that had forced her to watch as her brother was mutilated in front of her.

Marrying Robert had been a given after a couple of years of dating. His Lightwood name had been respectable enough—Benedict the Worm, notwithstanding—that even her parents had been pleased with the match.

Hindsight was 20/20 as the mundanes said, however, and Maryse could see that she’d made many mistakes back when she was younger, her marriage to Robert being the least of them. Mistakes that were haunting her even twenty-five years later.

Maryse bent to pull on her gold pumps. She checked her purse for her forged mundane ID, her stele, and the hilt of a small seraph dagger glamoured to be hidden from mundane eyes. She paused at her mirror then dumped her makeup in too.

Her phone vibrated on the vanity table.

> **Lucian:** _Are you ready? I’ll be at the Institute in 5._

Maryse stared at the text for a couple of minutes, smiling.

To be sure Maryse had made a million terrible choices in her life. She had fallen into a cult, turned into a hateful bigot, married an unfaithful ass, and nearly ruined her children’s lives.

Despite everything that had fallen out afterwards, somehow she couldn’t mark befriending Lucian as one of those bad choices. If she could change everything rotten about her life, she’d still want to have met him somehow—under different circumstances or among a different crowd than the Circle, absolutely.

Lucian had been her first true friend in the midst of the worst tragedy of her life; she would never forget or regret that. All she could do was hope that this time being in his orbit led to better things. They weren’t the same as before and good riddance. They were both older and wiser, tempered after decades of every trial they had endured.

There was no going back, only moving forward.

Maryse sent back that she was ready, shrugged into her pea coat, stepped through the door, and turned off her bedroom light.


End file.
